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Content issues Discussion on all aspects of content and content policy, including inclusionism, audience, original research, neutrality and copyediting | ||||
Could you please explain...
I got email advisories today that you deleted several article I started:
| page | when | log entry | question |
|---|---|---|---|
| Steinberg Award | 2022-11-28 08:48 | promotion of sympathy towards criminal |
|
| Harold and Mimi Steinberg National Student Playwriting Award | 2022-11-28 08:46 | promotion of sympathy towards criminal | |
| Steinberg Emerging Playwrights Award | 2022-11-28 08:42 | promotion of sympathy towards criminal | |
| 9 Circles | 2022-11-28 08:39 | no explanation for this deletion was offered... |
|
| Nikolas Cruz | 2022-11-01 08:13 | by policy, not encouraging articles describing people who commit atrocities or mass murders | |
| Steven Dale Green | 2022-11-01 08:11 | Copied from Wikipedia: by policy, not encouraging articles describing people who commit atrocities or mass murders |
Can topics, themselves, be biased? What does it mean to "promote sympathy towards criminals"?
Way back in September 2005 I had only made about 2000 wikipedia edits. I had never encountered a wikipedia administrator, and I was unaware of the wikipedia's deletion policies and procedures. Over the previous six months I had started stubs on a small handful of the individuals who were being held in Guantanamo. At that time it was US policy to keep their identities a secret - not even telling their families.
Then, all of sudden, four articles I started were nominated for deletion. One nominator's sole justification was the two letters "NN", and he declined to answer my request for an explanation as to what that meant.
Another person asserted that the topic of Guantanamo was "inherently biased", and could only serve for "America-bashing".
I thought about that one all afternoon. I concluded that topics are not, in and of themselves, biased. I concluded the only thing that can be biased was how we covered them.
I concluded that there was no topic so controversial that good faith contributors couldn't agree on the wording of an article about it that everyone agreed measured up to the standards of neutrality, verification, authoritative sources, provided everyone tried hard enough. I committed myself to the extra effort to measure up to those standards, whenever I tackled a controversial topic.
I am really surprised you characterized the articles I wrote on the Steinberg Awards as "promoting sympathy towards criminals". The Steinbergs, like Pullitzer, like Nobel, like the Motion Picture Academy, created a competition that grants awards to promote works of art.
Consider Schindler's List - a highly admired work of art. Yet Oskar Schindler, the protagonist, employed slave labor. He corruptly bribed government officials. The movie doesn't try to be neutral. It portrays him as a hero, because he made sacrifices, in the end, and he saved lives.
But someone else could have made a film that portrayed Schindler as a pure villain, and his saving of lives as motivated purely by cynicism.
You deleted the articles on the Steinberg awards. I am guessing that this is because they awarded Bill Cain an award, and, among his works was his play inspired by the Steven Dale Green case. Well, would you delete an article on the Academy Awards because Oscars were awarded for Schindler's List?
Your deletion log entries refer to a policy. I scanned your revision history, to see if you had drafted policy on when and how articles should or should not cover criminals. I didn't find anything.
Consider Alfred Dreyfus, convicted on innuendo, racism, and forged evidence, he spent decades imprisoned on Devil's Island, prior to his eventual exoneration. If someone tried to write a neutral article about him, during the period between his conviction and his exoneration, would this policy require its deletion? He was officially a criminal, then.
In many wikipedia discussions I argued that an article was neither a punishment or a reward. Sometimes the person arguing for deletion was some variation of "but Joe is basically a good person, they don't deserve to have stuff that makes them look bad talked about like this..." Alternately the deletion proponent would say some variation of "but Joe is basically a bad person, they shouldn't be rewarded with an article..." Articles are neither punishments or rewards. Individuals or topics become candidates for articles when reliable sources write about them. Period. If we are writing neutrally then the article is neither a hagiography or demonization.
What about Richard Jewell, the heroic security guard at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta? FBI director Freer ruined his life, by naming him as the prime suspect in that bombing. Director Freer implied the security guard wanted to be a hero so badly that he planted a bomb that he would later discover. Most press coverage was unfair to him. As I am sure you remember, more than half a decade later he was definitively cleared, when an anti-abortion kook, who mainly bombed abortion clinics, turned out to be the actual bombing. Jewell had been a bona fide hero, who saved dozens of lives.
The extremely unfair demonization of Jewell took place before there was a wikipedia or citizendium. I used to think that, if they had been around, a truly neutral article about Jewell would have helped to cool the hysterical leaping to the conclusion he was guilty. And, if Freer's innuendoes had contained a kernel of truth, a neutrally written article would still have served the public good, in helping to prevent an over-reaction.
Yes, there are ugly things in the world, like mass-murderers. I too am not that interested in supporting detailed coverage of murderers, where there is nothing more to their story than that they were murderers. But while Steven Dale Green seems to have been a simpleton, who couldn't finish high school, and who racked up some misdemeanor crimes, prior to enlisting, he is worth covering because he became central to other issues. I tried to explain this when we discussed him before. Scholars have cited his case in other contexts. I read an academic paper who cited his case when discussing the policy of not allowing the openly gay to serve in the military. The author argued that if the military had not been barring openly gay individuals from serving they would not have had to lower their standards to admit guys like him. Other scholars cited his case when discussing that lowering of standards - admitting dropout and criminals. I suggested then that the other wider issues his case was entagled with made it worthwhile to cover him, when it wouldn't be interesting or worthwhile to cover a murderer who was simply a murderer, and had never been covered as anything more than a murderer.
Wikipedia's COATRACK essay and wikipedia's notion of DUE WEIGHT
The wikipedia has a widely read essay known as COATRACK. It is often treated as if it were a policy, when it is only an essay. And those citing it routinely ignore its actual advice when citing it in deletion discussions.
The essay warns about articles whose first sentence, or first paragraph, says the article is about one thing, generally an actually notable topic, but then quickly shifts to covering something else. One of the colorful examples cited was "wongo juice".
The advice of that essay that is routinely ignored by those who cite it in deletion discussions, is that it never recommended deletion as a solution the problem of a contributor hi-jacking an article to talk about something else. Its advice was that, if the underlying topic of the article was notable the solution would be to trim back, or maybe even entirely trim out, the paragraph(s) that were really talking about something else
I don't have those Steinberg Award articles in front of me. But I am sure I didn't start talking about them, only to shift over to promoting Steven Dale Green. I drafted those in August. I don't remember whether I mentioned Steven Dale Green, by name, in the portion of those articles that mentioned Bill Cain. But, if I had, surely it was only a sentence or two. How could that justify the deletion of two whole articles?
Those who ignored what the COATRACK essay actually advised also ignored WP:DUE, a link to a subsection of the Wikipedia policy on neutrality. What I generally concluded was that the passages I had included in articles that triggered those COATRACK complaints, because they touched on something else, were short enough to comply with the DUE portion of NPOV. Topics are inter-related, and that means articles should mention related topics, and link to them, and, sometimes that requires a brief passage of coverage of that other topic, to provide context.
If you thought I went beyond that, in 9 circles, or the articles on the Steinberg awards, I suggest your choices included: (1) voicing your concern first, possibly on Talk:9 circles, on Talk:Steinberg Award, on User talk:George Swan, or via email; (2) shortening, or maybe even eliminating the specific passage(s) that triggered your concern, and then leaving an explanation on the talk page.
Given that there was no warning how would I know what policy I violated, so I could know how to avoid violating it somewhere else? George Swan (talk) 15:23, 28 November 2022 (CST)
MY RESPONSE: We shouldn't have articles on the lives of people who are *only* known for taking life
Mass murderers do not deserve fame or to have an encyclopedia article. This is known for encouraging more people to commit outrageous crimes in hopes of becoming famous. There exists on your Talk page this thread in which I discussed with you that I'd like to remove the first mass murderer article you had imported and expressing my distaste for it. Neither article placed any emphasis on victims and did not even name them. You asked for three months to rework the article and change its emphasis. But then as a result, you also created another murderer article stub, which you also failed to improve per my request, and you added articles about the play about the murderer and more articles emphasizing one particular award this play had one. I was frustrated yesterday to find TWO versions of the article about the play (each differing by a single letter in the title), so I couldn't tell which version to delete--and both pointed at the murderer article. And then, I found there were at least three different articles about the minor award, which was little more than a modest monetary grant as near as I can tell, with no one publicizing it except the group which granted it. Duplicating information across multiple articles on a wiki is not a good idea; the versions diverge and then no one can tell which one to edit. So yesterday, assuming you would not object because you seemed to have left the wiki, I removed the entire cluster of articles relating to the murderers. Those peripheral articles should I feel have been included in the stub murderer article anyway, and they pointed back to the now-missing article, inviting someone to create those again in the future. I understand very well how it hurts to have one's work deleted, but I am not willing to restore any of those articles right now. IF you return to the wiki and are active here, I will consider restoring the "9 Circles" article (whichever one you want), but with restrictions: I will not have it name the murderer except once in one footnote, nor will I have that name be an active link inviting for an article to be created about said murderer. Any information about the award can be included in the article about the play. You had included around a dozen excerpts of the play's reviews in the footnotes, and I read those, after which I still wanted that article gone as well, because most reviewers pointed back to the murderer as having been the main model for the play's protagonist. And, should it matter whether an author worked as a priest or a waiter to put food on the table? It seems like an attempt to add moral justification to him writing a play sympathetic to a brutal killer. But he could have set his play in any number of other times and places and still provided a setting for his version of Dante's nine hells as represented by a Kafka-esque bureaucracy. By choosing this sensational case to model, even if his intention was to lambast the lameness of the law, the government, the military, or psychiatry (and I don't KNOW what his intentions were, but even if they were "good" intentions), his results are muddied and weakened by the fact that his play engendered a certain degree of sympathy in reviewers for the murderer. And that's why I deleted that article. I couldn't have gone through the normal process of warnings without proliferating and attracting yet more attention to these murderer's names, so I have made an editorial decision, which is my right to do because I am, right now, personally and almost single-handedly keeping this behemoth of a wiki afloat because I believe deeply that it is still a better place to write than Wikipedia. If you have more objections after this explanation, I urge you to private message me. I will listen sincerely to everything, but I will not have these murderers names in the wiki any more than they already are, because as you know, nothing ever written in a wiki really disappears. George, I sincerely hope you will put up with our disagreement about this and return to The Citizendium, where you have informed and delighted me many times over the years. Pat Palmer (talk) 09:38, 29 November 2022 (CST)
- You are of course in charge here & can make policy as you wish, but you might like to think about this. It's certainly true that reports of crimes can cause copycat ones. But should the news be censored? It's not just that. Every time there's a news report of an Islamist terror attack it's followed by a spike in violence against Muslims. Every time there's a news report of Israelis hurtin Palestiisns it's followed by a spike in violence against Jews. In recent years there's been an uptick in violence against Chinese, and in recent months against Russians. We accept all this as part of the price we pay for free press & democracy. Proportionate coverage seems to me reasonable. What application that might have here I'm not expressing any opinion. See also [1]. Peter Jackson (talk) 05:07, 30 November 2022 (CST)
- Peter, I welcome your and George's comments, because it's a gray area. Wikipedia (WP) has long articles on all the mass killings. The WP articles have unrelenting detail, though they are not all under the names of the killers. I was unable to sleep for two nights after reading WP about SDG, the killer who got a sympathetic play written about him by a Jesuit priest. Any twelve-year-old might stumble across that article while reading about Iraq, and it would tempt reasonable parents to confiscate their kids' cell phones immediately. Clearly, George tried to do better here, and I appreciate that. *If* these articles get restored, I would like that the murderer's name not the title of the article if at all possible (though in some cases, it may have to be). If there are legal/social aspects making the case of interest, that should be made clear in the introduction. In other words, I am tentatively open to restoring any or all of these articles *if* my editorial requirements are honored.Pat Palmer (talk) 10:22, 30 November 2022 (CST)
- It occurred to me afterwards that we already have articles on Osama bin Laden & a number of his associates (nothing to do with George; probably written by Howard). Could it be said they're known for anything other than killing people? Peter Jackson (talk) 05:50, 1 December 2022 (CST)
- Bin Laden touched off a war, founded an international terrorist organization that occupied much of the world for decades, and thus is a figure who will for better or worse appear in history books. SDG (and his associates) are soldier criminals who murdered four people on their day off. Crimes of similar horror happen around the world at regular intervals though thankfully not "often" statistically, and we don't cover them usually. This particular crime got lots of press in part because of the play and its publicity, but also because at first there was a question of whether the crime was part of systematic behavior by troops in Iraq while doing their jobs. It turned out not to be, and there was no deliberate attempt by higher-ups in the military to cover anything up. SDG is only one example of a psychotic personality who should never have been allowed into the military--THAT topic might deserve an article. As for mass gun murderers such as NC, at most I think we might list their names in a catalog somewhere, but certainly not giving them a biography and an article of their own, because to do so is inconsistent--are you aware of how MANY of these take place every year? If we covered all of them, we would soon double the size of the wiki--and greatly increase the chance of children stumbling upon the descriptions of their brutal acts. That is what is happening over in Wikipedia right now--they ARE largely covering all of them, and it's a feedback loop creating an ever-expanding set of horrible descriptions of crimes. The more I think about this problem in such terms, the clearer it becomes to me that we ought not to grace every one of these cases with a distinct article. But as I told George last June, if there IS a compelling reason why a certain case is of special interest (and not just to lawyers), detail why that is true in the introduction to the article. That had not been done in the articles I have deleted.Pat Palmer (talk) 08:15, 1 December 2022 (CST)
- I'll just add one more about Wikipedia covering almost all the mass shooting cases. I can see why they might choose to do so, but since they ARE doing so, and in such detail, I don't see why we should do it also. It doesn't add anything for us to do it, even if somehow our articles are more nicely done. And frankly as an editor, I am horrified at the specter of being asked to overlook the creation of such articles every time such an incident happens, which in the United States right now is about every two to four days. On the other hand, I am reluctantly open to someone using this wiki to create an alternative version of an existing Wikipedia article, and then going over to Wikipedia and saying, "Let's do it this way instead". But no one has proposed to do that, and it usually doesn't work. Almost all of us have tried replacing some really awful material in Wikipedia with a better version of the topic that we first created here, and what usually happens is that the person(s) in WP who created the thing protect it there because of all the work they already put into it. I'm not going to make a rule that we can never have any articles in Citizendium about mass murderers, psychotic people in the military, or matters pertaining to violence. I'm saying let's have an intelligent, clear-cut reason for having those that we do, and maybe put a blurb on the Talk page explaining the motivation for a particular article to save us from recreating the debate we are having right now.Pat Palmer (talk) 08:32, 1 December 2022 (CST)
I'm considering deleting the article about Onion (dog)
Will anyone argue, now, against deleting the article Onion (dog)? I've put my reasons on its Talk page. Pat Palmer (talk) 10:36, 3 December 2022 (CST)